11of16John Earles works to set up registration on a business card while using a 1897 Chandler and Price Old Style letterpress at Spindletop Design and Workhorse Printmakers, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013, in Houston. Jennifer Blanco, John Earles and Joe Ross, partners in the graphic design and printing business, combine fresh design ideas with old-fashioned letterpresses techniques to rejuvenate the art of print. ( Michael Paulsen / Houston Chronicle )Photo: Michael Paulsen, Staff

Houston was the city she and John Earles had left. It wasn't New York. It wasn't a designer's dream city.

They look as though they were made for Brooklyn - the "new" Brooklyn of a decade ago, the trendy/scruffy place where talented young people flocked. Jennifer, 33, wears interesting glasses and dramatic red lipstick; John, 37, experiments with his facial hair. Their plaid shirts are pressed, their jeans rolled up just so. They don't use the word "hipster," but then, real hipsters never do.

New York was fabulous at first: They loved the fizzy scene, loved hearing top designers speak at industry gatherings. They had a great apartment in Red Hook. On weekends, they went mountain-biking upstate.

But in 2009, after eight years in Brooklyn, its promises had gone stale. Jennifer found clients as a graphic artist, but John, with a master's degree in fine arts, had to work a day job in trucking logistics. The couple pinned their big-breakthrough hopes on Product Superior, a dryly funny line of greeting cards, but they released it at precisely the wrong recessionary moment: Bloggers and tastemakers loved them, but stores weren't buying anything. When their landlord jacked up the rent on their studio, they finally admitted that it was time to go.

"Living in New York is like meeting someone really awesome in high school," John says. "Someone older but really hip. But after hanging out awhile, you realize you're not going anywhere with this relationship."

"At first it's inspiring," says Jennifer. "But then … "

"It's stifling," says John.

Houston was where they went to lie low, to recover, to figure out the next thing.

Thousand-pound anchor

"So at this time when we didn't know where we were going," says Jennifer, "we bought a thousand-pound anchor." It was a pedal-operated Chandler & Price platen letterpress, circa 1896.

Since her student days at the University of Houston, Jennifer had loved the look of old-fashioned printed materials; she particularly loved the old-school work of revivalist designer Ross MacDonald. To her, letterpress printing - the kind that involves putting ink on metal plates, the kind of printing that ruled the world before the 1940s - somehow felt warm and personal. Holding a letterpress card or poster, with its crisp type, the letters maybe making tiny dents in the paper, you could tell that a human being had made the thing.

In New York, Jennifer had bought the occasional antique hand-press online: cute little things, of a size suitable for carrying upstairs to a third-floor walkup. But in Houston, living in John's parents' house, they wouldn't have to deal with stairs.

The letterpress printer would allow them to print small batches of their cards more cost-efficiently, Jennifer argued. And they'd be able to print jobs for other people: No one else in town was doing that kind of retro-hip, high-end artisanal printing.

In John's parents' garage, they scrubbed off the press's grease coating, took the machine apart and repainted it. John says he "spent a month looking like a coal miner in some new-age Dickens play." He motorized the press, adjusting the belt speed so that the press wouldn't run too fast, wouldn't take off someone's hand. And suddenly, Workhorse Printmakers was in business: Clients found it even before Workhorse's website went live.

Jennifer was busy, too. She named her design business Spindletop Design, after the 1901 gusher that started the Texas oil boom, and attracted clients such as Fat Cat Creamery, Catalina Coffee and My Table magazine - small businesses, started by regular human beings, businesses whose success requires making their corner of the world an interesting place.

Without ever really thinking about it, Jennifer and John had stopped lying low, stopped wondering where they'd go next. Houston had gotten under their skin.

A Houston style

These days, Spindletop and Workhorse share space in a hip little metal building close to Washington Avenue - a place that like all designers' offices is constructed to reflect who they are. The place is a funny blend of style, old-fashioned industry and laid-backness. Every time one of the letterpresses starts to run, the lights at the conference-room table dim.

Jennifer says that when she returned to Houston four years ago, she hoped to connect with other people in graphic arts, so she went to events sponsored by the local chapter of AIGA, the professional association for design. (Back when letterpress printing was the industry standard, the acronym stood for American Institute for Graphic Arts. But now that globalism and broadening of designers' work make the old name obsolete, it's just AIGA, letters that don't stand for anything.)

"I went to some events, and was disappointed," she says.

"Say it," says John. "They sucked."

"In contrast to New York, yeah. In New York you'd meet big designers, you'd go to exhibits. Here it was less professional. You'd have a beer somewhere and not be able to hear the speaker."

"The problem with Houston was this lone-wolf mentality," says Joe Ross, a designer who recently joined Spindletop as a partner. "Everyone is in their car alone. There's been no design community. Nobody knew what anybody else was doing."

"It was part of the culture," says John. "Offices didn't share work with one another. Some still don't allow their designers to put their portfolios online. Lots of the firms have one big oil-and-gas client, and they're afraid of losing that client."

Big institutions, they note, still tend to go to designers outside of Houston: Even Houstonia, a new magazine devoted to Houston, hired a New Yorker to draw its first cover. "Great job!" says John bitterly. "Way to say that you have a class city: That there's not one designer in town good enough for that job. But that attitude is changing. And we're trying to make it change faster."

The "we" in that case refers to AIGA. A little more than a year ago, Andy Rich, now the group's president, recruited Jennifer and John to join its board and lead outreach. Since then, AIGA Houston's membership has almost doubled, growing from 286 to 500, and still moving fast. That jump was fueled in part by more budget-friendly membership rates, and in part by the city's bustling economy; but also by the sharpened sense that the group has something to offer.

The part that excites the Spindletop/Workhorse crew is the growing sense that there's a community of designers in Houston, not just isolated shops. Jennifer is now the group's vice president, and John and Joe are two of the group's three programming directors. AIGA has begun to offer a hectic schedule of professional events: a talk by internationally known typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler here, a mix-and-mingle night there, a new annual conference for in-house designers that attracts visitors from out of state. This year, the Houston AIGA chapter will sponsor more programming than any other chapter in the country, including New York. Suddenly, John says, designers in other cities see Houston as a place where things are happening.

"People are starting to think that we're a first-rate city," says John.

They even think that a Houston graphic style is starting to emerge: Not New York minimalism, not tech-edged California, but something type-driven, a little industrial, a little old-style Southern, with the occasional nod to Wild West wanted posters.

They don't say: The suddenly fizzy Houston design scene is a little like Brooklyn, when Brooklyn was just starting to become cool. But that hangs in the air.

"The rules are still unwritten," says John. "It's cool to be a designer here now. We're getting to help decide what the Houston style is."

Lisa Gray focuses on bringing the Houston Chronicle's journalism to platforms other than the one thrown into driveways every morning. Previously, she's held many of the Chronicle's best jobs: Features enterprise editor, member of the editorial board, columnist--and, most fun of all, founding editor of Gray Matters, the Chronicle site named "Best Blog" in Texas three years in a row.

Email her at lisa.gray@chron.com. Or follow her on Facebook, where she spends way too much time.